Skip to main content
Main

Indian Meal Pudding

A milk and cornmeal pudding sweetened with molasses and flavored with cinnamon and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Indian Meal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard

  1. In a kettle, bring 3 pints of milk to a boil.

  2. Mix 10 tablespoons of fine cornmeal with a little cold milk to form a smooth paste, then add to the boiling milk, stirring to avoid lumps.

  3. Once the mixture is partly cool, stir in ⅔ cup of molasses, ½ pint of milk, cinnamon, and coarse sea salt to taste.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered pudding dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 3 hours.

  2. Halfway through baking, pour ½ pint of cold milk over the pudding.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Molasses + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Cinnamon + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Milk + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornmeal thickens and bakes into a pudding.
Fine cornmeal
Thickens the hot milk as its starch swells, giving the pudding its body.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and deep color, and its flavor carries the pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornmeal paste into the boiling milk. Cornmeal added without first being smoothed into cold liquid clumps as its starch hits heat, leaving lumps. Stirring while adding it keeps the starch dispersed so it thickens evenly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Molasses SauceMolasses Sauce32 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes